Sounding Board's CEO Christine Tao on Why Everyone Needs A Coach

Jan 6, 2022

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The notion that leaders are born and not made can feel oppressive to founders and others working their way up the business ladder. Leadership is isolating enough without the toxic mythology that you’re just supposed to know how to do from the get-go. Our guest today, Christine Tao, Co-Founder and CEO of Sounding Board, is working to normalize coaching for CEOs, Founders, and others who want to become better leaders. Sounding Board allows organizations to manage, scale, and measure coaching on one unified platform. Their AI-Powered admin tools and centralized data insights integrate with our proprietary, managed coach network to deliver coaching at scale. Sounding Board recently closed a $30M Series B funding round led by JAZZ Venture Partners.

About Christine Tao:Christine co-founded Sounding Board in 2016 to solve the most challenging yet important part of her role as SVP of a fast-growing VC-backed startup: Leadership Development. Her experience as an operator at stops like YouTube and Tapjoy has helped guide at Sounding Board. She did her undergrad at UC Berkeley and her MBA at Wharton.

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In this episode we discuss:

02:33 The difference between a coach and a mentor

04:51 The lightswitch moment when she knew she had to found Sounding Board

08:26 Why she decided to turn her coach into her co-founder

11:53 The value and ROI coaching brings to clients and organizations

15:23 How the Sounding Board platform is scalable for future growth

18:55 Solving the cold start problem with a marketplace

21:13 The ICP for Sounding Board and what leadership means to Christine

23:35 How they landed at that ICP

25:10 How Sounding Board integrates with learning platforms

27:02 The biggest challenges coaches and organizations saw during the early pandemic

28:32 How Sounding Board standardizes it caching approach across organizations and internally